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The Tern is a future Navy unmanned aerial system that will deploy on and launch from surface ships such as destroyers. It is designed to be capable of performing multiple types of sorties such as anti-submarine warfare; information, surveillance, and reconnaissance; and acting as a node in a communication network. Each type of sortie has different operational and physical requirements manifested in the payload onboard the Tern. There are two forms a payload can take: fixed and modular. The fixed payload is hard-wired into the Tern while the modular payload space on the Tern supports the ability to change the payloads for each sortie. Multiple possible scenarios and operational postures add another level of complexity in determining optimal payload configurations. The overarching issue that we will address in this research is the general design of the Tern payload. This design must take into account the inherent stochasticity of the situations in which the Tern will operate. While conducting a primary task within a sortie, the Tern could also be called to carry out other tasks as the situation dictates. For every possible realization of a sortie a Tern is sent on, there is an optimal payload design that addresses the possible tasks in the sortie. Consequently, each design satisfies a given measure of effectiveness with a certain expected effectiveness. The objective is to find a global payload design that maximizes responsiveness over all possible sorties and scenarios.

Advances in payloads such as weapons and unmanned and autonomous vehicles need to be integrated into the Submarine Fleet to help maintain U.S. naval dominance. This thesis uses common submarine design equations to develop ...

This paper concerns the cooperative control of multiple manipulators attached to the same base as they reposition a common payload. The theory is easily applied to inertially based problems as well as space based free-floating ...